HEART of DARKNESS, A SEMI-BIOGRAPHY OF CONRAD

      When I read Chapter 5 from W. G. Sebald’s prose work, Rings and Saturn, I immediately realized that some of Joseph Conrad’s background can be found in Heart of Darkness. He himself went to Congo and we can see that he made Marlow his mouthpiece in the novella.

Conrad was born in Ukraine which once belonged to Poland. His father had been sent to exile after being discovered that he belonged to a group called anti-Russian rebellion, so in a way Conrad knew what being colonized means.

      Like Marlow, Conrad applied for a job in a Belgian company to go for Congo and got the job immediately for one of the captains had been killed by the natives. “I got my appointment – of course; and I got it very quick. It appears the Company had received news that one of their captains had been killed in a scuffle with the natives.” Like Conrad, Marlow has an aunt, too, to whom he writes. As a child Conrad wanted to go to Congo and he made this dream appear in Marlow: “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration…But there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.” Another incident that Conrad tells through Marlow is “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, - nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air – and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the tree.” I think this quotation is very important because here we can see Conrad’s feelings towards the indigenous people. He sees them as his equal and also criticises imperialism. Conrad had to walk for well – nigh forty days with a caravan of thirty – one men. A Frenchman fainted all the time, so they had to carry him in a hammock. In Heart of Darkness we can find a similar passage: “Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two – hundred – mile tramp… I had a white companion too, not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy…Then he got fever, and had to be carried in a hammock.”

      After having a deeper background about Conrad’s life, I think he criticised the European imperialism because in Congo he saw their behaviours. That is why he wrote Heart of Darkness in order to show how the Europeans brought civilization to the indigenous people.